Vessev built an electric ferry that almost flies
“When will we start flying?” I asked Vessev co-founder and CEO Eric Laakmann, as we pulled away from the Brooklyn marina in the startup’s VS-9 electric ferry. “We already are.” I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed. I thought the moment when it transitioned from sailing like a regular boat to almost-flying as a surface-skimming hydrofoil would be more … momentous.
- ▪“When will we start flying?” I asked Vessev co-founder and CEO Eric Laakmann, as we pulled away from the Brooklyn marina in the startup’s VS-9 electric ferry.
- ▪“We already are.” I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed.
- ▪I thought the moment when it transitioned from sailing like a regular boat to almost-flying as a surface-skimming hydrofoil would be more … momentous.
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Record
| Original publisher | TechCrunch |
| Canonical URL | https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/03/vessev-built-an-electric-ferry-that-almost-flies/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 03 Oct 2026 14:42:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-03T14:43:13.149Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-03T14:43:13.149Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | IqXj8vEoBX96 · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
“When will we start flying?” I asked Vessev co-founder and CEO Eric Laakmann, as we pulled away from the Brooklyn marina in the startup’s VS-9 electric ferry. “We already are.” I’ll admit I was a bit disappointed. I thought the moment when it transitioned from sailing like a regular boat to almost-flying as a surface-skimming hydrofoil would be more … momentous. I’ve been on my share of boats, including large ferries, small sailboats, and plenty of others in between, but never been on a hydrofoil and I was curious what flying along the water might feel like during the brief ride from the Brooklyn Marina out toward Governors Island on the East River in New York. It didn’t feel like flying, but it was a bit like a riding in a sports car.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at TechCrunch.
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